How not to save salmon

For centuries, killing
predators was to fish and wildlife management what leeches were to
medicine. By the mid-20th century, even the dullest minds in
government had figured this out.

But duller minds were
yet to come. Enter the administration of George W. Bush. In 2008,
it is hawking control of salmon-eating birds, fish and mammals as
if this were Dr. Kickapoo’s Elixir for Rheum, Ague, Blindness
and Insanity.

Virtually the entire scientific community
agrees that if the four nearly useless Snake River dams remain in
place, Columbia and Snake river salmon stocks will go extinct. Even
Bush’s National Marine Fisheries Service has admitted this.
Mostly because of these dams, the system’s cohos are already
extinct, sockeyes functionally extinct and 13 stocks in 78
populations are threatened or endangered.

Yet last
October, the Fisheries Service released its draft Columbia-Snake
salmon plan that calls for a surge in the war on predators. The
surge, together with barging young salmon, increasing hatchery
production and all the other bells, whistles and tweaks that have
failed so spectacularly in the past, will cost $800 million every
year. By comparison, the Army Corps of Engineers estimates the cost
of breaching the dams at $1 billion.

There is no legal
alternative to saving and restoring Columbia-Snake river salmon.
The Endangered Species Act requires it. U.S. District Court Judge
James Redden, who declared the Fisheries Service’s previous
plan illegal in 2005, and its amended version illegal in 2006, has
threatened to vacate the administration’s current plan, in
which it trots out the ancient predator-scapegoats -- squawfish,
Caspian terns and sea lions.

Squawfish, or
“pikeminnows,” as the PC fish police have attempted to
rename them, proliferate in dam-made dead-water where they eat
ocean-bound salmon smolts, especially the ones milling around as
they strive to figure out the nearly non-existent current, and
those injured or disoriented by passing through turbines.

Although no bounty system anywhere has ever worked, the Bonneville
Power Administration is funding the biggest one in history.
Implementing this counter-insurgency are Oregon and Washington.
“How can YOU save a salmon? Go fishing!” proclaims the
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, calling to mind the
equally brainless bumper sticker popular in Idaho and Wyoming:
"Save a Deer. Kill a Wolf."

For your first 100 squawfish
you get $4 each; then $5 each. When you hit 400 fish, the bounty
rises to $8. Catch a tagged squawfish and you collect $500. Last
year, taxpayers paid out almost $1.3 million in squawfish bounties.
Yet the squawfish population remains healthy and stable: In 2000,
bounty hunters killed 187,596 fish; seven years later they killed
190,870.

Squawfish are natives. But what are the feds and
states doing about the alien smallmouth bass that also proliferate
in the tepid impoundments and that also eat smolts? Nothing;
they’re popular with license buyers who almost always release
them.

Then there are those pesky sea lions. Because
salmon out-swim them in the open sea, the fish aren’t their
natural prey. But sea lions are quick to take advantage of
unnatural situations. So they've learned to travel 140 miles up the
Columbia River and chow down on adult salmon butting into the
Bonneville dam. Last March, the Fisheries Service granted Oregon
and Washington permission to annually kill 85 sea lions.

But there are also those voracious Caspian terns, which see the
salmon hatcheries on the lower Columbia as the world’s
biggest bird feeders. By 1998, 18,000 terns were nesting on
dredge-spoil dumps. Because they were also eating wild fish, the
Fisheries Service and the Corps of Engineers set about moving the
colonies to another spoil dump closer to the Pacific. But the birds
continued to proliferate. Now the feds plan to move them yet again,
this time to six new locations, including an island the Corps will
build for them on an inland reservoir. Projected cost for the first
year: $2.4 million.

Suppose the Bush administration
prevails against squawfish, sea lions and terns. Is it then going
to pacify the rest of nature? Will it attack cormorants, which eat
more smolts than sea lions and terns combined? And what about orcas
and those smolt-swilling walleyes and coastal cutthroat trout?

One gets the impression that if seismic activity
threatened an obsolete dam, our federal government would try to
rearrange earth’s tectonic plates. On the Snake River, we can
save dams or salmon -- not both. The administration knows this. Its
war on predators is based on deception. There can be no end and no
victory.

Ted Williams is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He is conservation editor for Fly Rod
& Reel magazine and lives in Vermont.

More from Water

Your comment begining with
"virtually the entire scientific community"
thinks the Snake dams should be removed is erroneous.
While no one would disagree that an unimpeded river is good for
fish, credible scientists aren't calling for removal of
these dams as a strategy for recovering listed NW salmon and
steelhead. Removal would only affect 4 of the 13 listed
species, one of which is in a safety net hatchery program,
and would add 5.4 million tons of CO2 to the air
every year (according to an independent analysis by the NW Power
and Conservation Council). Not a very good outcome for
fish, or humans for that matter! Further, harvesting of Snake River
fish occurs at rates approaching 50% and is
a documented factor limiting listed stocks
recovery, including sockeye. If you want salmon
recovery, the place to look, especially given the investments and
improvements made in hydro and habitat iarenas, is
hatchery and harvest reforms.

Anonymous

May 17, 2008 05:29 PM

You misread my piece.I didn’t report that virtually the entire
scientific community “thinks the Snake dams should be
removed.”I reported
that it thinks the dams will cause Columbia/Snake River salmon
stocks to go extinct.Even the
National Marine Fisheries Service has admitted
this.“Species” are not listed, stocks
are listed.Your numbers are
wrong, and hatcheries are hardly “safety
nets.”Removing the
dams will add no CO2.Replacing
the tiny about of energy they produce with fossil fuel and
continuing to squander energy instead of conserving is what will
add CO2.I’ll grant
that harvest is a factor (though a minor one compared with dams).
Finally, hatcheries are another
reason salmon are in trouble.Hatcheries abrade fins, which salmon need in the
wild.And they select for
everything wild salmon aren’t--domesticity, early runs
(because managers take the earliest eggs in order to fill space),
tolerance of crowding, and surface feeding (which makes them
vulnerable to avian predators).Best,

Ted
Williams

Anonymous

May 20, 2008 11:12 AM

Mr. Ted Williams,
I agree with you. I grew up in Idaho a quarter mile from the
Snake. I fished the Snake Up until I joined the
Navy. I am currently stationed in Washington and have been
reading/watching the news on the declining Salmon and
Steelhead. I love to fish for salmon and every year the
restriction and licenses are getting worse and more
expensive. Something needs to be done. In the
military we learn to improvise, adapt and overcome. With
all the money that the tax payers put into trying to save the
salmon and we need to look a different solution at trying to
save a natural food source that most everyone depends
on. Nobody eats the cormorants, terns, squaw
fish/pike minnow, seals, or sea lions. There should be a
bounty on all of them like the squawfish/pike minnow, especially in
the areas like the Columbia river and on all big river run areas
where the salmon produce the most. All this talk reminds
me of how they wanted to introduce wolves back into Idaho and I
know it ticked off a lot of farmers, ranchers and hunters just save
the wolf from extinction, well that worked very well and now the
numbers are strong and the farmers/ranchers/hunters are at a loss
to the wolves killing livestock, elk, deer etc. Oh buy
the way we don't eat the wolves either. We also
need to rid of the dams or make better fish
ladders.The salmon are just to
damn important to us for recreation and
food!!

Re: How not to save salmon

Anonymous

Aug 14, 2008 03:02 PM

Some common sense here: First and foremost, man is just too ignorant to successfully control mother nature. That said, it's a lot better to take a series of smaller steps in the right direction than to come up with a grand plan that's bound to fail.

While Snake River dams may not be large electric generators, many of the lower Columbia dams are. Sea lion troubles do not extend to the Snake dams; Bonneville and Cascade locks - yes. When Sea lions begin to take kegged up adult fish at the dam base and in the fish ladder - which I'll argue is an unnatural situation (albeit man-made), it's time to destroy them - and this goes beyond just salmon - they also take mature sturgeon. This goes for other species that heavily congregate on an 'at-risk' species - OK like cormorants, etc.. I'd like to point out that only Stellars are still at-risk. California sea lions number near 250,000 animals along the west coast. And Pacific NW Fur Seals are also in abundant supply. We need to take a hint from the French and snails and start making trouble-maker species into food of some sort.